


Chasing The North Wind

by Eustacia Vye (eustaciavye)



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-29
Updated: 2008-08-29
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:34:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eustaciavye/pseuds/Eustacia%20Vye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ghosts will come again, and if not caught I will be swept up in their flow and ebb tides.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chasing The North Wind

**Author's Note:**

> For the[ August Challenge](http://community.livejournal.com/rayne_shippers/1071278.html) on LJ's "rayne_snippers" community.

The girl in the box could think like the wind, but it wasn't language as others would recognize it. There was the cadence of sound and the push of syllables, but it didn't always match coherence of spoken language in the 'verse. The girl in the box had been twisted and reshaped, reformed into something new and strange and different, and she never fit her namesake as she had once she had spilled out it. She _flowed,_ fluid grace and liquid eyes, sinuous curves of pale flesh in the shape of a girl, the name of water and thoughts like the wind.

Softly, the sounds materialized into forms and syllables and words that others could understand, if not the order of the shapes they made. _It's just an object,_ she tried to say, but they couldn't grasp the meaning beneath the surface of the sounds. _It's the wind,_ she tried on a different occasion, but the syllables fell on uncomprehending ears and tumbled down without any meaning.

The wind whooshed past, unheard and unremembered, the current beneath the flow not catching them as she moved past. This wind could not be tamed, could not be harnessed, could not be governed. This wind was something wild and free, something beyond their ken and beyond human comprehension. There was nothing comforting or familiar in it, nothing that could be used by man. This wind held something sinister in the cold evaluation of others. The North Wind was chill, held no pity or humanity.

River knew she was different, knew she was whole and wholly apart, knew that they could never grasp the fundamentals of the change in her.

_Lie down,_ the whispers told her on the wind of a dead planet. Miranda was dry and stale, pale echoes of hunger and want and need, shattered ghosts unable to wander far from where they lay down and died of apathy.

She drifted closer to Jayne's side in the aftermath, as she tried to knit herself back together in something resembling the shape of a girl. "I hear the wind," she whispered, reaching for him, the river of ghosts flowing through her.

He called her _feng le,_ his mouth twisting the ugly words into existence.

"If you don't catch me," she warned, "if you don't chase me, the wind will take me. You'll never find me if the North Wind takes me away." River watched him with liquid eyes, could see that he couldn't comprehend the syllables as they formed. "Can't you hear it?"

"You got somewhere else to be?" he asked, exasperated. He had tools in hand, ready to help with repair of the bulkhead. He was brute labor, brawn and muscle and grit, not valued for anything more than that. Most of the time he believed he was nothing more than that, but secretly hoped that there was something more in store for him. River could feel the ghosts that clung to his skin, the soft shapes that they still held. She could feel the truth beneath his façade and knew that he was not as alone as he believed himself to be.

"They think me fixed, better as they would have it. But better is relative, and I am only myself. I was only ever myself, not the shell they wanted me to be. Do you understand?"

"No," he admitted, frowning. But he could see that the _feng le_ wasn't out to harm him, wasn't out to harm anyone. He could tell, in a way that he could never explain, that she was trying her best to communicate but couldn't catch the meaning behind the words. Her intent was to inform, but he _just couldn't get it._ It was damned frustrating.

"Say a prayer then," River murmured, head bowed. "The ghosts will come again, and if not caught I will be swept up in their flow and ebb tides. I hear them, Jayne. I always hear them. I hear the things that people cannot say, will not say, would never say, and I feel the things they cannot bear to feel."

There was something almost like pity in his eyes, but she didn't want that. River turned away, and he caught her hand as she turned. "What's it like?" he asked her, furrowed brows almost endearing. He was _trying,_ didn't know why he would want to do such a thing, but by Buddha he was _trying_ as hard as she was.

"Capture a Cortex feed," River whispered, shaking her head. "A fraction of the input I receive, a minute processing. It's difficult to enumerate, but I know it's there."

"S'at why you're so odd?" Jayne asked, voice oddly gentle.

"This girl is a Reader that sometimes cannot separate the self from non-self," River murmured. "I flow like a river, winding to the sea, dissolving in the spray of knowledge not my own. The wind would kick me up into a wave, but I crash before communication is completed."

Jayne sat her down at the kitchen table and pushed a mug of tea into her hands. "You still fly straight, don't you?"

"As a leaf on the wind," River replied, a sad tilt to her lips. "Yet another ghost with me."

Jayne didn't understand, didn't pretend to try. He sat across from her. "That day... Behind the blast doors..." He shook his head, unable to put the thought into words. "That weren't no Reading skill," he said finally.

"They programmed multiple skill sets," River explained. She sipped at the tea gratefully. It was too difficult to remember to feed the body sometimes; the mind was always spinning in a dozen different directions. "They thought to make an assassin of me, a projectile weapon of manifest destiny, but something went wrong with the programming and I listened to the wind instead of to their myriad orders."

He rubbed at his face tiredly. "Trying to get you is wearing me out," he admitted finally. "I get that you're not someone gonna slit our throats in our sleep. I get you're a girl and a weapon both. I get it. I don't get what you say half the time. You don't put it simple."

"I'm okay now," River murmured, her head cocked to the side. She could observe his distress, could realize that he was uncomfortable with being out of his depth. He was a man in charge of his personal universe, he was one that would wield the reins of his destiny. River understood that fate was a tricky thing, something that could carve a hole in stone with enough time. She knew that she wasn't the captain of her own ship, that her destiny had been written in stars and wind and time long before she was born. Her time was spun out around her, ticking away in fractions of decayed muons. She knew about hidden dimensions, the levels of inaccuracy and uncertainty that lay inherent in matter that Jayne thought was solid.

Physics was built up on uncertainty and certainty; the dichotomy would drive lesser minds insane as they tried to reconcile it.

He didn't accept the words at face value, recognized them for the placating inane syllables that they truly were. "Do you even _try_ to make us understand you? I mean, I'm trying to get you, I really am. But are you even trying to help me out?"

River blinked. The flow of the wind in her chest stopped still for a moment, and the clarity was almost painful in its perfection. "No." She hung her head, hair spilling down all around her in a dark wave of protection. "What if it didn't work? What if you still didn't understand what I was trying to say? What if it didn't matter what I said and you still thought me crazy? It would hurt more, then." She looked up, eyes brimming with unshed tears. "It hurts enough as it is, Jayne. I know I'm different. I know I'll never be what they want me to be. I know I can never get back those lost years, that lost time that Simon wishes he could give me. I know it can't be done. I can accept that. I can live with that, but he can't. And it hurts that I can't be who he wants me to be, that I can't even give him that."

Jayne reached out and cupped her face in one rough hand. The other caught the hand around the mug of tea. "I never knew ya then, so I can't say who you used to be. Simon talked about how smart you were, how you danced. Right? I don't think he wants the same sister, just a sister that isn't someone's puppet. And just now? I got that just fine. But it doesn't matter what someone else wants you to be, only what _you_ want you to be. So are you a girl or a weapon or a Reader? Or something that's all three?"

She smiled through the falling tears. The frantic push behind her chest had loosened, the click of a lock undone. "Can I be all three?"

"I don't see why not."

"You are kinder than they would give you credit for."

Jayne's head ducked down in a rare moment of shyness. "Don't tell nobody. Mercs ain't supposed to be kind, you know."

River could see the flash of a dusty plain, a weather beaten house and a mother with bruises along her arms from a drunkard father who couldn't rein in his temper when alcohol overflowed his veins. A thin younger brother, disease in his lungs and lack of medicine but a mind sharp as a tack and rapid as a rabbit on the plains. A younger Jayne, a more hopeful Jayne, promising his mother he could find work to help them before it was too late and Mattie died. Years spooling past, whizzing with pain and hurt and disappointment and blood. The drunkard died, but the thin mother and brother hadn't, had survived on the wages he had sent back with lies on the missives about transit jobs and security positions. It was a kindness of a sort, the veneer that protected their illusions about the 'verse and their place in it.

"There is kindness in every heart, however deep," River replied with a soft smile. She brought up a hand to cover the one on her face. It startled him, and she could feel his heart skip a beat as he realized what they looked like.

She didn't mind, she realized. The girl could appreciate his form, the weapon could appreciate the skill beneath the skin and sinew and the Reader could feel the layers and hidden depths that the veneer of stupid brawn kept hidden.

"I'd better go," Jayne muttered, shaking his head. He drew his hands away, amazingly gentle still, and couldn't meet her eyes.

"You've caught the north wind, Jayne," River whispered to his retreating back. She couldn't help but smile, and wanted to laugh. He didn't understand the import of what had just transpired, didn't realize that he had just become her anchor in the 'verse. With such a grounding anchor, her shattered mastery of the flows would solidify. Her speech would lose its lilt and the winds would begin to coalesce into something more comprehensible. The flow would be directed rather than loose, the river channeled into something coherent.

They hadn't even known they were chasing the north wind, and here it was, caught between them within layers of fragile understanding. There had to be some kind of irony there, some twist of fate that River hadn't yet foreseen.

She finished her tea and skipped to the bridge on the tips of her bare toes. The metal beneath her feet was cool and real to the touch, the dress flowing from her shoulders in a soft silken cascade. The ghosts smiled at her, too languid to rise from their perches on the ground. The solitary ghost on the bridge mock saluted her, eyes dancing to see she was so happy for a change.

"Where to?" he asked as she settled into the pilot's chair over him. His voice was a whisper of wind, a shift in air molecules.

"Wherever the captain needs to go, wherever the wind wants to be."

"That's the spirit. Land and sky and the whole wide 'verse to fly in. There's nothing better than that," Wash said with a grin. "Well, maybe my autumn flower, but that will come in time."

"Oh, yes. All things will happen in proper sequence."

And for once, River could believe that was true.

The End.


End file.
